An increasingly large number of individuals use portable computing devices, such as laptop computers, personal data assistants (PDAs), smart phones and the like, to support mobile communications. The number of computing devices, and the volume of data communicated, has increased dramatically in recent years. Market studies have concluded that this trend of ever-increasing demands for data communication coupled with subscribers seeking expanded mobility will continue.
As telecommunications technology continues to evolve to meet this ever increasing demand, service providers continue to make investments in state-of-the-art technology in order to remain at the forefront of offerings in the marketplace. However, in order to maximize the experience of their subscriber base, service providers are constantly challenged to ensure trouble-free support for the modern wireless data communications protocols, while limiting subscribers who consume excessive bandwidth at the expense of other subscribers.
In third generation data communications networks, subscribers are typically provided with a high bandwidth limit for technical reasons. Specifically, the high bandwidth limit ensures that the bursty nature of the current generation of data communication protocols is fully supported. The engineering assumption made by wireless service providers is that each individual subscriber in the customer base infrequently reaches this high limit. However, some subscribers are exploiting this high bandwidth setting and are continuously using the service at the high bandwidth limit. These subscribers are considered to be abusing the communications system. Since there is an overall bandwidth limit in any given geographical coverage area, continuous usage at an excessive level by certain subscribers reduces the available bandwidth for the rest of the subscriber base. The net result is a diminished experience for the vast majority of subscribers. Although the number of subscribers who are guilty of excessive usage is currently few, their numbers are expected to grow significantly in the near term, and pose a significant challenge to communications network providers.
Prior solutions for network fair usage control defined a period of time and a data volume that can be used over that period. For example, fair usage might be defined as consuming less than 10 MB over a one hour period. Any subscriber exceeding this volume in that time period would be deemed excessive. A service provider wants the time period to be as short as possible to detect the excessive or “unfair” usage. However, making the time window shorter places a higher and higher processing cost on the control system and also the policy enforcement point in the network. Because typically a small percentage of subscribers would have an excessive usage, shortening the time window means very high processing costs that are not relevant to the vast majority of subscribers.
What is therefore needed are systems and methods for providing adaptive fine-grained fair usage controls without excessive load on the control system or policy enforcement point. Co-Pending, commonly owned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/389,818, entitled, System and Method for Adaptive Fair Usage Controls in Wireless Networks, file Feb. 20, 2009 describes an approach to providing fair usage controls without excessive load. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/389,818 is incorporated herein in its entirety. The present application provides additional adaptive fair usage controls and approaches to reduce load on control systems and policy enforcement points.
The present invention will now be described with reference to the accompanying drawings. In the drawings, like reference numbers can indicate identical or functionally similar elements. Additionally, the left-most digit(s) of a reference number may identify the drawing in which the reference number first appears.